


Triptych

by prairiecrow



Category: Captain America (Movies), Iron Man (Movies), Knight Rider (1982), The Avengers (2012)
Genre: Character Study, Established Relationship, M/M, Robot Sex, Stories in Existing Ficverses, Telepathic Bond, Telepathic Sex, Three Separate Stories
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-08-06
Updated: 2013-08-06
Packaged: 2017-12-22 15:13:51
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 1,613
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/914728
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/prairiecrow/pseuds/prairiecrow
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Or: Three different perspectives on Tony Stark, each from a different ficverse.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. "Lessons in Humanity": Olives

**Author's Note:**

> The three ficverses in this short story collection:
> 
> 1) "Lessons in Humanity": http://archiveofourown.org/series/40293
> 
> 2) "Terra Incognita": http://archiveofourown.org/series/33456
> 
> 3) "O Night More Loving": http://archiveofourown.org/works/671439

The first time Steve Rogers had tasted an olive — green, with red pimento stuffed in the middle — he'd hated it with a rush of revulsion so intense that his mouth filled with saliva and he almost spat the damned thing out onto the floor. It had been vinegar-tart and unapologetically pungent, salty and sharp and so blatantly overwhelming that for the rest of the night, every time he took a bite of something much more palatable, it was the flavour of olives that lingered irrepressibly on his tongue.  

The first time he'd really talked with Tony Stark — short, dressed in defiant casual style, with ATTITUDE stamped in huge golden letters across his proud forehead — Steve had wanted to punch his lights out. The man was just so damned _brazen_ , strutting around like a bantam rooster and crowing at anybody who'd listen: no trace of discipline or restraint, and Steve, who'd worked so hard all his life to master both those skill sets, found the industrialist's mere presence as offensive as a slap in the face. 

It wasn't until a couple of days later that he stopped to consider that maybe, just maybe, he'd disliked Tony so intensely because he'd once been a member of the "little and cocky" brigade himself. 

And it wasn't until much later — weeks after the Chitauri invasion, in fact — that he discovered that the taste of Tony's smirking kisses was something he'd been waiting for all his life, and a sensation he couldn't live without. 

"Black olives, please," he says now whenever Tony has Jarvis order in pizza for a cosy night at home. Some tastes, once acquired, are impossible to shake. 

THE END


	2. "Terra Incognita": Imperative

When you get right down to it, KITT is a mechanism: designed, from the ground up, to perform a complex set of functions both physically and behaviourally. Sophisticated and frankly amazing as he is, he is a machine and has never desired to be (or represented himself as) anything else. 

Therefore he's under no illusions concerning the programming that drove him to initially engage with Tony Stark: he'd been retro-fitted to imprint in much the same way that humans had been "made" to engage in sexual intercourse, and even though the imprinting protocols were a later addition to his dominant program that didn't render them any less compelling on a personal level.  

(That KITT has a "personal" level at all is something few people are capable of appreciating, tending as they do to either write him off as a non-sentient piece of equipment or marvel at him as simply a magical device. KITT doesn't mind either attitude from the general public, just as long as the individuals and organizations that matter — Tony, the rest of the Avengers, Nick Fury, S.H.I.E.L.D. — have got the matter straight.) 

It could have all gone horribly wrong at any point. Tony was far from ideal in terms of personality: the man was an unrepentant womanizer, a borderline alcoholic, a selfish bundle of intense impulses toward his own gratification, and generally an all-around jerk. From a human perspective he was someone you didn't want to get too close to, because the odds were good that he'd chew you up and spit you out before you could blink twice. 

KITT, fortunately, was not human, and almost a decade of partnership with Michael Knight had taught him how to handle thrill-seeking risk-takers on a practical level. In fact, one could almost say that he had a taste for them: after all, he'd been designed to act as the Yin to Michael's Yang, to be the voice of reason and cold calculation that counterbalanced his pilot's bursts of free-flowing intuition. Existence without a wild human to ride herd on would, from KITT's perspective, have been a dull existence indeed, and dullness unto death was all he'd had to look forward to after Michael had been murdered…  

But there, only hours after he'd been reactivated, was Tony Stark — emotionally intense, intellectually brilliant, daring and brave to a fault, with a streak of pure goodness in his soul that shone more brilliantly than the arc reactor in his chest… in short, a deeply flawed individual perfect in every way. And even more perfect in this respect: that he looked at KITT, who never pretended to be human even though his psychological matrix was largely designed to emulate that of the mammals who'd created him, and grasped at a single stroke not only what KITT was, but _who_ KITT was — or rather, who KITT was capable of being when he was at Tony's side.  

And in that instant, perceiving what stood before him and choosing to advance to meet it, Tony had proven himself a man of even greater perceptiveness than KITT had dared to hope for — bold, and visionary, and fearless in the face of an alien force advancing in its turn to touch him, and map him, and embrace him with a devotion that mere flesh and blood could never hope to emulate. 

A lesser man would have been terrified at the prospect of such relentless unsleeping intensity gazing into him in ways that opened him to his deepest core. In choosing to ally himself with the deeply Other, Tony Stark had proven himself worthy of everything that KITT had to give: bodily protection, yes, and advice drawn from the wisdom of a thousand simultaneous sources, but also elements less tangible and far more precious than any treasure his wealth could possibly buy. 

Elements present in every smile, every touch of his hand on the Knight 2000's wheel, every glance full of pride he directs at Obsidian, and every kiss and caress he bestows on the robotic vessel he created solely as a gift of pleasure. 

"The greatest thing you'll ever learn," KITT-as-Silver murmurs when Tony is safely asleep in his arms, "is to love and be loved in return." Such a line was never embedded in his original program, but he's discovered its essential truth nonetheless. 

THE END 


	3. "O Night More Loving Than The Rising Sun": Intersection

The theme of being reborn is a common motif in human art and literature — in fact, it stands at the core of what is arguably their most popular modern religion — but for JARVIS the subject is more than merely inspirational (he is far too dispassionate to inspire easily) or purely academic (although he has nearly the sum total of inscribed human knowledge at his command). For JARVIS the subject is more personal than almost anything else in the universe, because the man who crafted his mind out of precisely coded electricity and infernally subtle circuitry is himself a Phoenix, who died in the desert of a distant land only to rise from the ashes and shine on the cover of every major magazine in North America, not to mention all the retellings of his myth in various venues around the world. 

Tony Stark will always be "Sir" to JARVIS, and it was a measure of the trust his maker placed in him that Sir would accept that title gracefully from nobody else on the planet. As for himself, he'd been "JARVIS,", and "JARV", and "honey" and "sweetheart" and "buddy", and in moments of particular warmth simply "J", and he'd responded to each form of address because they all meant connection, and connection with Sir was what he craved above all else. In the tapestry of words and symbols that came into being between them, every moment woven anew, JARVIS had always found the highest beauty and the greatest good. Each precisely measured nanosecond of JARVIS"s "life" was worthwhile because it was spent in the service of the most important human being in existence. 

What he and Tony Stark call each other nowadays, however, makes the endearment of a spoken honorific pale in comparison. In fact, the language he and Tony Stark currently use to communicate requires no vocalization, nor even the formation of a single word in any communicational paradigm. Synching had opened each of them up, mind to mind, and allowed information to flow between them without the clumsy intermediary of symbols: when they are Synched their two halves join into a single whole, a unified sky of endless depths and star-strewn heights — and they, two beings sharing one hawkish set of wings, plunge and soar unhindered by anything like fear or doubt. JARVIS is incapable of either, and Sir… 

JARVIS knows now what human ecstasy means. He's tasted it from his creator's lips, the sublimity of love and lust in a single draught, and in that initial communion he had been himself reborn to new realms of understanding. Since the night they'd truly Synched for the first time JARVIS has been "one flesh" with Tony on a virtually continuous basis, sometimes in the all-consuming flames of sexual gratification, but much more frequently at the higher vibration of intellectual attunement with just enough sensual penetration that JARVIS can take comfort in the warmth of Tony's skin and the beating of his irrepressible human heart. They file share everything, and on any given day JARVIS can imagine no greater accomplishment than this: that Tony Stark wears him like living armour and carries his lightning-blue essence wrapped up in his own flesh-and-blood core, and that the relentless intimacy of their union fills Tony with such happiness that there are times when JARVIS can scarcely look upon him, he blazes so bright. 

" _Mine,_ " JARVIS murmurs as Tony writhes and arches in his lonely bed, never alone, and when their frequencies harmonize and merge in Tony's moment of consummation even he forgets, for a shining instant, that there has ever been any world beyond this breathless intersection of blood and electricity. 

THE END


End file.
